Daydream thread... without the rose-tinted specs

lostinrates

CTC, any room for underfloor in your down stairs?

I'm doing it in the renovated bit (after my wobble on it, i know its right for me) and the new bit (because it makes sense).

I HATE rads. With a passion. And we don't have much wall space. But I did put a cast rad in new bathroom. Its a warm room for this house but I like a rad and or towel rail in bathrooms, because towels benefit. Besides, it gives the cats something to sit on other than me (they troop into the bathroom with me and sit on my belly in the bath and this bath is deep so they'll be furious) .

That only leaves me with three rooms down stairs to dither over.

Although it will be really expensive (more than in a reno at your stage) I'm quite tempted to retrofit underfloor heating. No rads on view, wall space (at a premium in these rooms). And. I'm arguing when set against the cast iron rads and other repairs the floors might need it won't be that much more expensive......but with no price its a hard one to argue!

Edit. Here's the thing. I'm tight. Our money has to go a LONG way....two places to live, all my health crud, and the huge expenses here. But its not worth not doing somethings not right IMO. So etchings I think are ok to bodge a bit. Furnishings. Decorative stuff even. Anything easily and not too expensively redo able.

But big stuff like heating? We only want to do it once. I made the wrong, panic call in the kitchen. We have temp rads in there. Its ok, we'll put underfloor in, keep the rads and I'll put rad covers on them. We'll want both options I think. One day maybe we'll be able to swap for nicer rads. But the other heating...that's a once job. Things that involves new piping and floors?

I'll do without to afford them. My grocery budget this week was slashed back to what it used to be years ago. . Felt good. Resident parent will be complaining though. .

choille

After the war the prefab house was a temp answer to the housing shortage. Some of them are still going strong & people became fond of them, but they knocked a lot of them down in Dundee a while back.

Prefab should be utilised again really.

COOLTRIKERCHICK

I did ask/think about under floor heating, so we wouldn't have to have rads downstairs, BUT basically our place has no footings... and after having some talks with the stonemason about the damp on the central/inner walls of the house.. we have decided not to put any damp coarse down,( floor is now concrete, the original flagstones were put around the house as a path) and control it by, controlling the water/drainage around the house ( the French rains we spoke about on here a while back) and not put under floor heating in.. The flagstone tiles will be put straight onto the concrete...


It might sound daft/stupid maybe not do the floor etc, but managing the damp/water on the outside, will hopefully mamage it on the inside.. if that makes sense..

Better_Days

LIR - I lived in Denmark for nearly a year (many moons ago) and they had a lot of underfloor heating in their houses with woodburners to supplement. Both are lovely. If I could afford it I would certainly go for underfloor as you get such nice even heat (and the animals love it ). A few years ago we stayed in a barn conversion for a week which had underfloor heating and I really liked the way it was 'zoned' to control the temperatures in the various living areas.

Still retro fitting isn't cheap.......

lostinrates

Better_Days wrote: »

LIR - I lived in Denmark for nearly a year (many moons ago) and they had a lot of underfloor heating in their houses with woodburners to supplement. Both are lovely. If I could afford it I would certainly go for underfloor as you get such nice even heat (and the animals love it ). A few years ago we stayed in a barn conversion for a week which had underfloor heating and I really liked the way it was 'zoned' to control the temperatures in the various living areas.

Still retro fitting isn't cheap.......

I think people keep saying its not ideal here because of the chimneys (they have a big negative impact on underfloor I think and we have six in the finished build) and high ceilings. I don't care any more. I think it will be better, slow, low, even heat, for the house.

lostinrates

COOLTRIKERCHICK wrote: »

I did ask/think about under floor heating, so we wouldn't have to have rads downstairs, BUT basically our place has no footings... and after having some talks with the stonemason about the damp on the central/inner walls of the house.. we have decided not to put any damp coarse down,( floor is now concrete, the original flagstones were put around the house as a path) and control it by, controlling the water/drainage around the house ( the French rains we spoke about on here a while back) and not put under floor heating in.. The flagstone tiles will be put straight onto the concrete...


It might sound daft/stupid maybe not do the floor etc, but managing the damp/water on the outside, will hopefully mamage it on the inside.. if that makes sense..

Ok, we've also already laid concrete, but....we insulated it. It will mean our insulation order isn't ideal and I'll be heating some concrete at some cost, but...meh,.....it'll make a bigger 'storage heater' impact.

Its a brave move not going for a damp course these days. I know a lot of people for whom they have cause no end of problems though.

We've done it slightly differently. Our plastic membranes in our single story bit ( the only bit we have done) go to eaves level. This is because essentially, there is nothing breathable or original left in this part of the building and we've made a 'new building' in an old shell. It means I can grow things up the side, have a raised bed against the side of the house. Because we new water levels here might be a problem. (Like yours part of our place had no foundations, but we gave it foundations because it was falling down, and we know part of it at the other end has either been taken down or come down. We know wet ness has been a problem in the past too, there was a pond and a street , no longer here, and well under the house.


We're on clay .


Its really interesting to see how people cope with problems in different houses in different places. There is no one right answer. . There are a great many wrong ones though:rotfl: ,

Davesnave

MrsAtobe wrote: »

Why did I have to be nosey and look on Right move to see what the W word was? It never ends well, I always end up looking at what's available in our area that I can't afford This comes with 1.7 acres but is a 'tad' expensive.

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-26056101.html?premiumA=true

Gosh, Mrs A, you took me back by posting that place, not that we ever looked at anything even half as grand. It was during the early days of our quest, when I discovered Monmouthshire was so close to Bath by motorway that we could contemplate living there and still work some of our usual sales haunts.

We looked at two properties: one of them half of a mill in the little St Brides valley between Penhow and the Harry Potterish Junction 23a, which no one seems to know about! It was idyllic, but I could still hear the M4. :mad:

The other one was odd. It was ag-tied and neither the widowed owner nor the agent wanted us to buy it! They did everything possible to put us off. Obviously, they wanted to market unsuccessfully and then get the tie lifted. It was a nice situation, but there wasn't enough room in it for my Dad, nor anything for him to do there, so we were no threat!:rotfl:

Looks like a gardener bought it. There were no trees and few flowers at that time:

https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en-GB&ll=51.693811,-2.764718&spn=0.000717,0.001742&t=h&mapclient=apiv3&z=20&layer=c&cbll=51.693811,-2.764718&panoid=k2Pic55V_JhwUqFLfmcVlA&cbp=12,238.47,,0,-4.89

alfie_1

friend has underfloor heating and be warned she says COSTS A BOMB !! and she can afford it !!

lostinrates

alfie_1 wrote: »

friend has underfloor heating and be warned she says COSTS A BOMB !! and she can afford it !!

Its on,y really meant to provide low level heating, Not 'hot' heating.

Davesnave

alfie_1 wrote: »

friend has underfloor heating and be warned she says COSTS A BOMB !! and she can afford it !!

Too many different kinds and levels of insulation to know what conclusions to draw really, but my BiL used a wet system in his part-renovation/part new build with high levels of insulation, and his is cheap/toasty.

But.....he has a different problem: condensation, lots of it! :eek:

Solve one problem, get another.